MaxQ

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Man, I don’t know. The story of this song is a story with several parts. One part is all about me learning to play the bugarija. Another part is about a song that had two sets of lyrics and took a long time to find itself. And the last part is about how this song that finally found itself wound up being the name for a themed collection of songs.

MaxQ started with a little riff on my dad’s first bugarija, which I was then learning to play. It’s the riff you hear most prominently through the song – easy to play and rhythmically compelling. And that’s where it stayed for awhile, just a fun thing to mess around with on the bugarija.

Of course, I’m a songwriter, so I started to hear a melody, especially the little two note hook where the title goes. For a while I was working with the title “Luke Blue.” I think I could hear the future shining through the ooo sound in Blue. I did find my way to the beginning of some words to go with this title based upon a physics lecture by Richard Feynman in his “Character of Physical Law,” wherein one observes blue ink in a tank of water illustrating an “arrow of time” by dispersing evenly through the water until the water was all “luke blue”.

That title led to a dead end.

Then came MaxQ. There was some confusion here. For a while I thought that MaxQ would just be a pen name. I admire Mark Twain as a writer, but I also admire the name Mark Twain itself, which strikes me as the ultimate pen name, evoking a piece of Americana (Mark Twain being a measurement of the depth of a river as measured from a river boat) while also serving as a memorable and plausible name for a writer (although Samuel Clemens wasn’t bad either.)

One day I was following a SpaceX launch and heard the commentator talking about the rocket approaching MaxQ (the point of maximum dynamic pressure in a rocket launch), and had an epiphany. What a great pen name!!!

And so it is.

So I had a song named MaxQ, a pen name MaxQ, and then...I got an idea for a whole set of songs built upon the concept of MaxQ.

You see, humanity is in a spot right now that is not dissimilar to the situation of a rocket accelerating through our earth’s thick atmosphere. There’s a lot of resistance to our rocket coming from the thickness of the air, and although the air is getting thinner as we ascend, the rocket is accelerating so quickly that more and more air is needing to be shoved aside for our rocket to continue its ascent. It’s getting rough out there, and it’s going to get rougher before it gets smoother. MaxQ is the point where it starts to get smoother.

Humanity is in a similar difficult spot right now. We are being buffeted by climate change, ocean acidification, overpopulation, resurgent fascism, emerging artificial intelligence, destabilizing social media, unpredictable emerging military technologies – the list goes on and on – and it’s not clear that we are going to survive this launch. Will we make it to MaxQ? Beyond?

So MaxQ also wound up being the unifying context that led to a whole new collection of songs written through late 2020 into the beginning of 2021.

But it’s also a really cool song too.

MaxQ

MaxQ

We’re going up now

MaxQ

We’re riding on the Big One

And if it helps

If it helps

Everybody inhale

And if it helps

If it helps

Everybody be real nice to your neighbor

If it helps

MaxQ

We’re riding on the Big One

MaxQ

We’re going out now